Introduction

I have created these twelve commandments of recruiting to better assist you with your technical recruitment and placement needs. As a technical headhunter with over 23 years of staffing experience, I have filled many hundreds of technical jobs worldwide for such clients as ITW, Intermatic and Wrigley Company.

These are just a few of the employment tips I have accumulated. The beauty of them is they will apply to a wide range of jobs; not just technical jobs and technical hiring. Though specifically targeted for engineering, scientific and IT jobs, you can also apply them to a myriad of jobs and employment situations that you need to tackle.

Every month for the next 12 months, I will share some of my recruiting knowledge with you. Though every job, employment situation and staffing circumstance is different, these recruiting tips will apply to a wide range of jobs and employment opportunities.

Please check in every month for a new recruitment tip. I hope you enjoy them all.
– Scott Sargis

The 1st Commandment

As an executive recruiter with 23 years of technical placement experience, I have learned many recruitment tips that can help you more quickly fill your technical employment requirements. This is the first of the twelve commandments of technical recruiting that I will be sharing with you on a monthly basis. Think of each as recruitment gold! Though these are geared towards engineering jobs and technical placement and all jobs and employment scenarios differ, they will assist you in a myriad of staffing situations.

The first recruitment tip is the pie chart question. What you want to do is ask your candidates to break down for you by a pie chart what they did on a regular basis. For example, an electrical engineer may say they spent 60% of their time on C+ + programming, 30% on hardware redesign and 10% on documentation. I recommend repeating this question for any technical criteria that is important to you.

The benefit of the pie chart question is it will force your candidates to more precisely identify for you what they actually did on a regular basis. As a result, you will greatly streamline your employment process and reduce your errors in staffing.

The 2nd Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is the 1 to 10 rating scale interview question. What you want to do is ask your job candidates to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on your key job attributes. This interview scale starts at 1, which means no job experience in that attribute, 5 means average job experience in that attribute and 10 means job mastery of that attribute. For example, on a scale of 1 to 10 how good of a C programmer are you?

The benefit of the 1 to 10 rating scale interview question is it forces your job candidates to more precisely identify for you what their actual job skills are. So remember to employ the 1 to 10 rating scale interview question with your key job attributes.

The 3rd Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is the 3rd magical interview question, “What do you do?” Employment research shows that open-ended interview questions tend to elicit more useful career information from candidates. One of the best open-ended interview questions is, “what do you do?” Please use this question in conjunction with other interview questions including those interview questions I shared in the last two month’s of technical recruiting tips.

The benefit of this interview question is it will help you gain more useful employment information from your job candidates in the interview process. So remember to periodically ask, “what do you do?” to every job candidate during your interviews.

The 4th Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is the 4th magical interview question, “What does that mean?” As I mentioned last month, open-ended interview questions tend to elicit a lot more useful career information from candidates. As a result, you want to ask, “What does that mean?” in conjunction with other interview questions such as, “what do you do?”

This will prevent a job candidate from talking in generalities during their interviews and help you to better pinpoint their true job skills per your employment requirements.

The 5th Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is the 5th magical interview question, “Why did you leave?” You want to ask and restate this question throughout the interview. This will help you to gain more insight into this job candidate’s mindset.

For example, if you are interviewing someone who repeatedly left their last jobs due to overtime and your job requires a lot of overtime, then this candidate is probably not a good fit for your staffing requirements. Therefore, remember to ask, “Why did you leave?” throughout your interview process.

The 6th Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is the 6TH magical interview question, “Why did you join?” Ask this interview question for each job a candidate lists on their resume. This is a companion interview question to last month’s, “why did you leave?”

This will help you gain even further insight into this job candidate’s mindset and prevent you from making an employment blunder. So remember to ask, “why did you join” for each job a candidate held.

The 7th Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is the 7th magical interview question, the mirror question. Let me demonstrate this by an example. Let’s say that: a) you are interviewing a candidate b) you ask this job candidate who their best friend is and c) the candidate’s response is Joe. Then you ask, “If I were to ask Joe what type of person you are, what would they tell me?” Do you see what I did?

My over twenty years of recruiting experience demonstrates that most candidates will try hard to mirror that person’s actual response (e.g. Joe’s response). You can also plug in a wide range of people into the mirror question including past employers and co-workers. Regardless of whom you plug in to this interview question, this job candidate’s answers will tend to very truthful. So remember to employ the mirror question during your job interviews.

This is the final one of my seven magical interview questions for you. Next month I will change gears and offer you other types of technical recruiting instructions.

The 10th Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is investigate candidates on the Internet. A lot of candidate information exists on the Internet especially on social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Therefore, you want to dig deep.

The 11th Commandment

This month’s technical recruiting tip is phone screen first. You can gain a lot of information from a properly structured phone interview. This can save you a lot of time and money in the interview process. For example, it can prevent you from spending thousands to fly the wrong person in. Furthermore, it can save the precious hours of your executive’s time to interview this erroneous job candidate. So remember to phone screen first!